Tag Archives: AdWords

Ever needed target US-based services and sites for related searches that occur in foreign countries, but come up against a language barrier? As in: how can I write ads in this language, let alone provide a landing page in it? And do I even want to? Recently, I was asked to do just that by a client who had one particular country in mind for geotargeting with AdWords. Looking through analytics for our regular US-based, English-speaking campaigns, I’d nonetheless been finding a number of visits from several other countries – visits that piqued my interest with low bounce rates and above average time on page and pageviews – so I decided to target these as well. I decided to try an experiment: since the site content is in English, and the content is US-related, I’d test foreign geotargeted serving ads in English – to see how these stacked up to our regular campaigns.

For these campaigns, I set up a mirror image of some of the top-performing Ad Groups under a new “Foreign” campaign, and then took a moment to exclude the new target areas from the existing US-based campaign (under campaign Settings), and then setting that to US and EN language only. Based on analytics data, I used a mix of targeting criteria including Regions, Countries, and Cities to target the hightest-traffic, best performing areas. There’s no need to exclude the US from this new campaign – only the specified geotargeting is included. Because I can’t write ads in the foreign languages in question, and because the site itself is only in English, I again only targeted English for this new Foreign campaign, switching from the default All Languages setting